you know you're bored when watching snooker sounds fun

this essay is killing me. its so boring! what sane person in their right mind would find writing about early gothic interesting.

look:
On the basis of your reading in the Gothic genre how far would you agree that it is hard to define "Gothic" precisely?

snore.

i have written this am an dying

Quote by zzzz

While it is certainly possible to explore the Gothic genre, to define so precisely would perhaps hinder an investigation into a literary category which has both spanned two waves and encompasses far broader interests than can be explained when detailed succinctly. Instead, Gothic is attracted to broad, interlinked themes than can be seen it literature since the genre's inception in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, presented via a multitude of tropes working to illustrate this. Much of Gothic's fuel is provided by the contemporaneous atmosphere its writers find themselves in, yet as the genre has evolved so too have the fears that the authors have projected, moving from anti-Papism and mocking of The Enlightenment towards more explicitly human-based insecurities, notably including the workings of the mind and condemnation of the hypocrisy present in society. Definitively, Gothic could be said to be the antithetical treatment of the earlier Romantic literary period; where men are isolated and insignificant, confrontation reveals fallacies and fear is projected onto that which is manifestly horrifying. The Gothic genre has accumulated tributary variations, such as British and American Gothic, yet its underlying purpose still can be seen in a way that defies those critics who claim the genre invites despair for those who attempt to categorize it.
Such a viewpoint emanates from the literary critic Joel Porter, who states that "the critic searching for something like a unified field theory of Gothic fiction will certainly be tempted to throw down his pen in despair". To claim that Gothic is able to be presented under a banner of a "unified field theory" is to ignore the wide berth and interest its literature holds. Therefore, it would seem sensible to break down the genre into its component, repetitive parts so as to seek a collective connection which could then provide a start in defining the genre. Arguably most basic of these are the Gothic tropes, which through uncanny, intertextual recycling and continual use are the generic basic diet of Gothic literatures' ideas. In its youth, Irving Malin believes the genre was populated with three main identifiable tropes: "the haunted castle, the voyage into the forest, and the reflection of distorted reality". While the transference to the second wave from 1820 has all but eradicated the distant castles and deep forests, the continuation of ideas of imprisonment and confinement in contemporary Gothic suggests that the underlying themes transcend setting and that Gothic can utilise fears applicable to the time period in its pursuit of the authorial message. This would certainly seem to be the case surrounding the British genesis of the genre, which with the gradual introduction of the Age of Reason saw the move away from

more boring than the bible :o(